Current, daily pricing for negotiable securities available in the world markets is typically commercially available from various reporting agencies, such as Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, Interactive Data Corporation, and others. Reporting agencies typically collect information from various markets around the world and compile aggregate pricing lists that they typically make available to the public for a fee. Financial institutions use such pricing lists to value their assets, as well as the assets of their customers, on a daily basis.
The nature of the pricing information collected from the world markets causes the various pricing lists that are available to contain differences in the listed prices for a given security. These differences are attributable to time differences in acquiring the pricing information and foreign exchange rate fluctuations throughout the day. Thus, the same security when valued at a foreign currency rate at different times of the day, by different agencies, is likely to have a different price depending on when it is priced.
An entity interested in valuing a particular asset may prefer securities pricing information from specific vendors, depending on the location of the valuing entity and/or the asset being valued, the type of asset being valued, and the currency in which the asset is priced. For a securities management or other financial organization, the compilation of “golden copy” reports of price lists for securities for internal use as well as for dissemination to other entities on a global scale is a labor intensive and expensive process. The golden copy price list of a set of securities is a designated, master version of the price list for the set of securities at a given time.
The concept of the “golden copy” of reference data involves creating a trusted set of data for all aspects of operation within an organization. A golden copy is also necessary to conform with regulatory reporting that is required for financial organizations. However, there are numerous challenges for a service provider in creating a trusted golden copy for each member of its global subscriber base. For example, there is no single source of all the required data because data originates from both domestic and foreign sources. Additionally, each subscriber's organization is interested in satisfying its own policies, procedures, asset mix and relationships, each of which makes each subscriber's requirements unique. Further, data acquired from internal and external sources for compiling the golden copy for a particular subscriber are not static, thus certain information included in the golden copy becomes stale quickly if not continuously refreshed.